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Any news from Planetquest?
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 Send message Joined: 18 Sep 04 Posts: 163 Credit: 1,682,370 RAC: 0 |
Hi, with the current lack of work from LHC, I was wondering if there are any news from Planetquest. The last newsletter is from early this year. Maybe someone knows more. Michael Team Linux Users Everywhere 
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Send message Joined: 23 Jul 05 Posts: 1 Credit: 2,019,978 RAC: 0 |
Hi, on a german message board, I read one hour ago, that there are some news in work at the moment and will come soon.. I think, we have to be patient - some other, who´s translating for this Project, told me recently that the beta tests start unfortunately at the earliest at the beginning of 2006.. :( Greetings from Germany, Snow |
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Send message Joined: 18 Sep 04 Posts: 163 Credit: 1,682,370 RAC: 0 |
<blockquote> on a german message board, I read one hour ago, that there are some news in work at the moment and will come soon.. </blockquote> So there is hope. Can you post the link to this message board? <blockquote> I think, we have to be patient - some other, who´s translating for this Project, told me recently that the beta tests start unfortunately at the earliest at the beginning of 2006.. :( </blockquote> That is unfortunate, because I would love to join this project. Discovering possible planets outside our solar system and beeing acknowledged personally is really appealing. Michael Team Linux Users Everywhere
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 Misfit Send message Joined: 27 Aug 05 Posts: 55 Credit: 8,216 RAC: 0 |
http://groups.google.com/group/PlanetQuest me@rescam.org |
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Send message Joined: 24 Nov 05 Posts: 3 Credit: 121,479 RAC: 0 
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Hello, Will this project be BOINC based? --James |
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Send message Joined: 18 Sep 04 Posts: 163 Credit: 1,682,370 RAC: 0 |
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Send message Joined: 16 Jul 05 Posts: 84 Credit: 1,875,851 RAC: 0 |
PlanetQuest Collaboratory Newsletter April 2006 "We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened." - Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn Dear Friends of PlanetQuest: Hello to all of you once again, with our apologies for such a long silence! Much happened during the last part of 2005 and start of 2006, as you will read about below. There were changes in our organizational structure and personnel, two successful observing runs in the northern and southern hemispheres, and significant progress in the development of the Collaboratory software. Our special thanks to you all for your continued support! PQ Personnel News New Executive Director Dr. David Gutelius has left PlanetQuest as Executive Director to pursue his many projects, including teaching at Stanford University and working on economics in the Arab world. We have greatly appreciated his expertise in getting the PlanetQuest project off the ground and set up for business. All the best Dave! Our new Executive Director is Brad Silen, owner of Quality Process, a computer software development company, which is now working closely with PlanetQuest to produce the codes for analysis of stellar photometric types, BOINC updates needed to distribute the planet finding to you, and interface with our new star catalogue. Brad has degrees in Engineering and Philosophy! Welcome Brad! Thanks to Outgoing Personnel We thank Dr. Jay Doane, one of our programmers, who moves on to other projects after working on the first stages of the single-star transit detection algorithm (TDA) for PlanetQuest. We wish him all the very best in his new pursuits! We thank Sylvia Paull, our first fundraiser; we have appreciated working with Sylvia and meeting many of her contacts in the software development and science education fields. We appreciated her cheerful and upbeat approach toward obtaining funding for PlanetQuest. Welcome to New Personnel Welcome to Dr. Craig Linberg, our new physicist. His PhD is in signal detection and estimation. He has been working with both the eclipsing binary transit modeler, as well as the planet detection algorithms. He brings a special knowledge of subnoise detection methods that will allow us (actually you!) to push the limits of planet detection down to smaller and smaller sizes as we obtain more data. Welcome Craig! Astronomical Observing - Siding Spring and Lick Observatories We have completed a one-month run at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, gathering data from stars in the galactic center (the region known as "Baade's Window"), which has the densest number of stars in the sky, with the exception of globular clusters (stars in globular clusters appear to be too poor in heavy elements to have any planets form around them, judging from surveys of both 47 Tuc and omega Centauri). We have chosen Baade's Window as it is the densest region in the night sky (in both hemispheres) and has been the target of the OGLE (optical gravitational lensing experiment) project, which indicates that there are at least 170 million stars that can be observed there down to 18th magnitude. We used the 1.0-meter telescope at Siding Spring, which has a wide field imager covering a 52 x 52 arc-minute field of view (i.e., almost a square degree!) We have also completed our observing run with our newly designed and built focal-reducing lens and prime-focus imaging system (which widened our field of view to 40 x 40 arc-minutes) on the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. Our special thanks to Drs. Robert Slawson (PlanetQuest astronomer) and Zoran Ninkov (PlanetQuest board member) for the design and quality control. The new system was mounted at the prime focus of the Crossley telescope and performed perfectly over our one-month observing run, allowing us to obtain excellent photometric precision down to about magnitude 19. We observed low-galactic-latitude regions to maximize the number of stars available for PlanetQuesting, some centered in open clusters like NGC 559, since planets discovered in star clusters can also be dated. (We shall outline how this is done on our website shortly - the basic idea is that the color of stars in a cluster can give a rather good idea of its age.) The field here was in the constellation Cassiopeia. The Crossley telescope was the world's first modern (metal-on-glass) professional-sized (0.9-meter) reflecting telescope, built in the 1870s and given to Lick Observatory in 1895, and still works very well with our state-of-the-art optical-mechanical-imaging system. We used a back-lit UV-sensitive 16 million pixel square array along with the Stromvil stellar classification system filters (a mix of the Stromgren and Vilnius photometric systems) so that we may preclassify, photometrically, the stars you are going to look for planets around. Collaboratory We have found that the analysis of eclipsing binary star systems (double stars that orbit close to each other oriented in such a way as to eclipse each other across our line of sight) for planetary transits will take a significant amount of computational time but that these should be prime targets for planet detection as one will get at least two transit events every orbit of the planet. We now have eclipsing binary stellar classification software running and ready to be integrated into the TDA (transit detection algorithm) and converted to the BOINC format for distribution to you by, hopefully, early this fall. The detection of eclipsing binary transits was pioneered by three PlanetQuest scientists - Dr. Hans Deeg (of the Canary Islands Astrophysical Institute), Dr. Jon Jenkins (of the SETI Institute) and Dr. Laurance Doyle (of PlanetQuest). We expect to be able to have a beta test ready soon. Stay tuned for this development! Our goal is a release you can try out by early this fall, when we can also expect to have enough data to accommodate 10,000 or more users. Education We have made an informal agreement with the NASA PlanetQuest project (the name of a new spacecraft mission formerly known as SIM - Space Interferometry Mission) to promote each other's websites (ours to be referred to as the "PlanetQuest Collaboratory" and theirs to be known as "SIM PlanetQuest"). We look forward to mutually promoting and assisting each other in bringing exciting educational experiences to you! We shall continue to add to our "Astronomy in All Cultures" essays on the website with the goal of having a global interactive tool for learning more about the astronomy of indigenous peoples around the world. We have a multitude of interesting ideas and sources of graphical educational material we will be bringing to you soon, including (we expect) illustrations from a National Geographic television program on habitable planets in which Dr. Doyle was interviewed as a guest scientist and also helped to write the script. The show was called "Extraterrestrial" in the United States and "Alien Worlds" in the United Kingdom. Website Note We have recently updated the PlanetQuest website and are planning further and continuing updates! Important Note About PlanetQuest Funding Sources Last, but certainly not least, we have decided that the best way to fund PlanetQuest, at least to start off, is for PlanetQuest membership to be a nominal $2 per month ($24/year) to allow us to have the number of stars track the number of users. We have devised a way to allow incremental acquisition of telescope time so that as PlanetQuest users are added, their contribution of $2 per month will allow us to provide a continuous stream of data, in addition to adding continuing utility to the Collaboratory. We will start with a stellar photometric-type classifier and a transit detection algorithm (both for single and double stars) but hope to add a gravitational lens planet detection algorithm, an eclipsing binary minimum timing planet detection algorithm, and a new method for doing SETI based on information theory, as well. Annual dues of $24 for membership in the PlanetQuest Academy will allow many more people to participate in planet searching, while also allowing us to bring you more features in the Collaboratory. Eventually we may be able to offer PlanetQuest for free based on, for example, a Web advertising business model. But for a start, PlanetQuest Academy membership dues will help us bring you the best possible opportunities for discovery of new worlds! With best regards, Laurance R. Doyle, President Brad Silen, Executive Director J. Ellen Blue, Director of Publications PlanetQuest ps) We shall be sending out another newsletter shortly with details on PlanetQuest membership and donor information. We'll also mention details on the "live" release of PlanetQuest this fall. Much thanks again for your support! Linux Users Everywhere @ BOINC [url=http://lhcathome.cern.ch/team_display.php?teamid=717] |
 Send message Joined: 7 Mar 07 Posts: 59 Credit: 7,906 RAC: 0 |
I'm a big supporter of PlanetQuest. My online bill-payment service has been donating a BIG whopping $5 a month for over a year. That's enough to pay for three weeks of coffee service! Just a bump to get the attention of other PlanetQuest enthusiasts... got any info to pass along? Luv ya all!  Ariel: Certified "Too Cute for LHC" Cruncher! . . . . . . . . . . . . -- Consider the lilies. |
MEX Send message Joined: 2 Sep 04 Posts: 12 Credit: 1,363 RAC: 0 |
I received an email a couple of days ago from Dr. Laurance Doyle, who is the President of PlanetQuest. Dr. Doyle wrote:As far as i know, PQ isnt online until now ... but see yourself what is going on: http://www.planetquest.org/about/computing/ MfG, MEX 0xFF |
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